ASPEN, CO.- The Aspen Art Museum presents Mai-Thu Perret’s new exhibition 2013, through Sunday, April 12, 2009. Mai-Thu Perret makes complex and evocative artwork in a variety of media—from handmade and folksy to cool and conceptual. Her ongoing literary project, The Crystal Frontier—a fictional account of a feminist commune in the New Mexico desert—serves as impetus for a theatrically charged, fabricated alternate reality, which includes all of the commune’s inhabitants, their personalities, reasons for relocating, their diary entries, and their artwork. The women themselves sometimes appear as mannequins. Taking cues from Modernism—the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism in particular—as well as Busby Berkeley musicals, couture inspired costume design, Surrealism, and fractals, Perret transforms diverse sources into evocative surrogates.

Within 2013, Perret divides the space of the AAM’s upper gallery into a series of elegantly composed rooms containing a number of recent works that, reconfigured, allow new literary and aesthetic associations to arise. A multiple, A Portable Apocalypse Ballet (Red Ring), is placed and repeated in each of the chapel-like rooms of the installation, allowing other objects to respond, reflect, and emphasize the form. The placement of the works becomes a thoughtful choreography, complete with wallpaper designed and produced for the exhibition that creates a unified backdrop on the gallery’s south wall.

Mai-Thu Perret was born in Geneva , Switzerland in 1976, and currently lives there and in Berlin , Germany . Her solo exhibitions include Land of Crystal, Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, The Netherlands, 2007; the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, 2006; Solid Objects (with Valentin Carron), Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland, 2005; and The Modern Institute, Glasgow, Scotland, 2002.

Mai-Thu Perret: 2013 is organized by the Aspen Art Museum and funded in part by the AAM National Council. Exhibition lectures are presented by the Questrom Lecture Series.